Free Idea Dumping Ground

I'm not sure about you, but I get a lot of ideas. They're cool and all, but there are only so many I can follow through on.

I did a little digging and found that the forums don't have a "Free Idea" thread. Now we do. This is it.

In a way, this thread is sort of a "general inspiration" thread. So, post your ideas that you think are good, but you don't care to do yourself.

Here's a few to get the ball rolling:

• Superhero story with a "fairy tale" theme. Maybe draw from folklore, legends, and myth. For example, characters inspired by Arthurian Legend, Norse Myth, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Japanese legends...
• Horror movie about a serial killer who targets people through Social Media. "I Know Where You Were Five Minutes Ago."
• Superheroes as experienced by a First-Person Peripheral Narrator. Maybe a bystander, maybe a journalist.
• 1920s Prohibition as a Disneyfied musical.
• Christmas album with carols in their original, secular lyrics. (Fun fact: "What Child Is This?" started as an English love ballad called "My Lady Greensleeves.")
• Video Game with lots of diverging story options, but they all come back to the same ending. An Aesop of You Can't Fight Fate.
• One for the Conlangers: a Yodel language. Tonal. Relies on vowels, diphthongs, and the occasional /h/, /d/, /l/, and /ŋ/.
• A Prairie Home Companion style variety show meets live-streaming video.

Have at it!

PS, if I'm mistaken and TV Tropes does have a "Free Idea" thread, please direct me to it so I can contribute these ideas. (EDIT: There was another "Free Idea" thread, but it has a confusing name so not many people notice it — myself included.)

PPS, if you use any of the ideas we spout off here, please let us know where to find it. I'm sure some people would like to know their ideas are being put to good use.

PPPS, if you post here, your idea is fair game for anyone to play with. You have been warned.

edited 26th Nov '17 2:18:19 PM by AwSamWeston

• A school of young circus performers.
• A magical library that contains every book.
• A story about a mysterious wizard that goes around turning people into animals.

In the distant past, a dead star passes through a population II star system, throwing at least one of its planets out into interstellar space. It is a living planet, with protein-based life and a civilization more advanced than our own, but not advanced enough to save them from this. With only a small amount of radioisotopes, the planet has a relatively cool interior^note [It's not clear how much of the Earth's internal heat is produced by radioisotopes(radiogenic) and how much has been there since the planet's formation(primordial). For the scenario's sake I'm assuming it's mostly the former.], and without the sun, they're running out of energy sources.

Many of them enter deep stasis early on. The rest struggle with the environment and each other, becoming more and more ruthless as the planet cools and dies. Eventually, complete tyrants take control over what's left of the population, with the help of artificial intelligences and deadly implants. When there is almost nothing left for them to do, they go into stasis, ordering their AI's to revive them if there is a reason to. They know that they probably never will. Of course, against all odds, the planet enters our solar system in the near future.

It's called the Plotbunny Shelter. I don't blame you for not being able to find it, though - it's kind of ill-used lately.

Already kind of did the second in my novel Eldritch Fairytales, although it wasn't exactly a main setting, and the library kind of literally contained every bit of information currently in existence, information that has yet to come in existence and information that could have been. Also the library wasn't exactly a library, just an Eldritch Location that the protagonists perceive as a library in order to be able to comprehend said location.

If you want I can give you a coupon code for a free copy.

A lot of my ideas are too good to give away, I want to reserve them for my own uses.

That said, I had a couple of ideas just the other day:

1. In the present or the near future, some sort of apocalypse occurs that annihilates human civilization on every continent except Antarctica. The few thousand people still alive on Antarctica have to figure out how to survive in the freezing cold with no new supplies from the civilized world.

2. In the present, the human world is invaded by demons, who reveal that God is ignoring us (or has vanished entirely) and the powers of Heaven have become complacent. The catch is that the demons aren't really evil, just different; they have weird ideas about how the world should look and how society should be run, but they won't actually harm humans who don't resist them. Of course, while some humans try to come to grips with the radical changes the demons want to impose, others choose to fight against the invasion.

Also, by the way guys, the infinite library thing has already been done.

Okay.

I'd also like to remind everyone that Trope Title Shows has show pitches based on trope titles.

Here's one: A Gentleman Adventurer and Super Hero themed off the Quintessential British Gentleman who fights villains with his Parasol of Pain or Sword Cane. Maybe a Steampunk setting.

• A recursive Mouse World.

Shouldn't we close this and go back to Plotbunny Shelter? I didn't even know that's what it was for.

I'm not sure. "Plotbunny Shelter" is kinda misleading, so there's more chance that if we close this thread, another one like it might pop up. Just speculating.

HEROES WITHOUT BORDERS: Essentially, a black-ops team of superhumans. Or to put it another way, "They do the heroics that don't end up on the front page of the Daily Planet." (Think The A Team meets X Men, and you've got the basic premise).

The fact that very few people used Plotbunny Shelter, presumably because, like yourself, no one knew what it was for, is a pretty good reason to just switch to this thread.

Fun fact: Zefrank and the Vlog Brothers have a term for these kinds of ideas: "Brain Crack." Take a look.

And here's one I've been holding on to for a little bit: A storyline or subplot of Funny Background Events, a la Abed in ''Community" S2E03.

edited 17th Feb '14 7:27:13 PM by AwSamWeston

Here's one: A Genre Savvy Super Villain who applies to a Legion of Doom. They don't like his unconventional methods, so he has to struggle with Contractual Genre Blindness vs. his Dangerously Genre-Savvy potential.

I was JUST about to make a thread like this when I noticed this. I keep notebooks filled with these. Here are a couple I've come by I really liked in things or thought would be interesting to play along with.

- Character facing someone who can copy their techniques just by seeing them and keeps doing so. They gamble on a Dangerous Forbidden Technique with the intent of making the enemy copy it & lose because of the drawback of using it.

- Create a rival with a Trade Your Passion for Glory type setup. The first appearance against them, protagonist manages to either defeat or just comes in at a draw. This serves as wake-up call, creating a far more dangerous rival who gets back to their basics & lives up to their reputation in next appearance. Protagonist might underestimate them in future one because of first go around.

- Frame someone for theft by placing whatever transferred into their account and leave enough evidence to make it appear that they're the ones responsible.

- Sell a rival con artist a convincer that is meant to fail, sabotaging their future con. Cons them out of money at the same time.

- Weaker, cunning villain uses it to get to position of power, becomes Drunk with Power, and devolves into The Brute.

- A strategist who aligns with a villain purely to show off their skills, doesn't believe in them the entire time, and calls it quits when they feel things timed right, abandoning things after they've built enough of a reputation then going elsewhere to people who would be impressed.

- Sword fight. Unarmed person attacked, catches sword, breaks blade then uses broken part of blade to fight back while other continues to use broken sword.

- A test filled with multiple questions to find a suitable heir

- Sell the mark a location then get them arrested for trespassing.

- Use the sweetheart swindle to get close to The Mark & then become The Shill later on.

- A master character fails at something due to their own belief that their apprentice could only learn things from them. They try to use logic "I taught you everything you know, but not everything I know" to make light of them & get caught off guard by fact that they aren't dependent on them alone to learn.

edited 7th Apr '14 10:33:15 PM by Prime_of_Perfection

One idea and if an Expy for the character in the work I'm writing is a hit I'll work on it myself: a woman who adopts a orphan from the September 11 terrorist attacks. Look at how losing both his parents affected him, the controversy and conspiracy theories surrounding it, the woman trying to raise a...however old he is (anywhere between two to eight I think would be good,) the things the woman had done and what the boy would think of them (without spoilers I had a few ideas, worked as a spy or soldier, and how that might fly with Afghanistan and Iraq.) And if you weren't aware orphans were granted something like four million dollars in compensation, that could add to the drama as well with people trying to get his money, as he gets older whether any girls interested in him are in it for the compensation, whether his mother adopted him for that reason. I think it would make a great drama.

- A gang war between two mafia-esque families who each controls a different half of the city, saturated with chivalry overtone, with a bit over the top characters, such as a protagonist who dual wields hand cannons with concealed bayonets with nearly superhuman agility.

...and I guess that's it for now. But I'll make sure to keep an eye on this thread. Quite a few interesting ideas I see just from skimming a bit.

With my tabletop RPG group, we're gonna be doing a Bad Future setting (essentially, a Robot Rampage a la The Terminator), so reworking our characters into Future Badass types is gonna be interesting.

So howzabout reimagining any of your characters as their Future Badass selves (whether through artwork, written description, or RPG writeup, or whatever)?

A young man is imprisoned for a murder he did not commit. Years later, as an old man, he is released from prison and bends his ever thought towards finding and revenging himself upon the murderer who stole his life. He eventually discovers a way to travel through time, and goes back to that day and place to wait. He sees a man walk into a building with what appears to be a weapon and shoots him... only to discover that was the murder victim, and he is in fact guilty of the crime he was imprisoned for.

Then he goes off to talk with robots in the desert of the future.

This was one of my dreams. !Dream logic!

A cannon that can fire people through time.

Modern day High School AU noir retelling of a historical event.

Or "That one inspired by this old thread of mine and especially this post:

set in the bush with the sugar company owner's son from a rich Spanish immigrant family who meets the new Argentinean transfer student at boarding school and teams up with him alongside his brother to launch a revolution against Mayor (and Principal) Batista who's in it thick with the local gangs. And our anti-hero/Villain Protagonist has a female friend who's his most ardent supporter. Will actually be a comedy.

...That's just so my idea it's crazy. I genuinely think the only person who's likely to find this funny is me.

Just one of my never-going-to-happen stories:

A story set twenty, thirty even forty thousand years in the future. While technically post-apocalyptic, the story would be set long after our civilization was forgotten. In it the surviving humans would be unable to get past about bronze age level technology because of the lack of easily accessible coal, oil, iron and other materials.

I could never write this because it would be WAAAY to much research.

A fantasy kingdom under assault from a powerful demon's army, only instead of an actual demon, it's a supercomputer from our world that has gone rampant and attacking a neighboring dimension through teleport tech.